The CIA's Secret Corona Spy Satellite Program

hello it's scott manley here 60 years ago this image was taken showing a soviet airfield this was the first photo ever taken by an operational spy satellite part of the cia's corona program the corona program began in the late 1950s and operated until 1972. it would be 20 years later when the us decided to start declassifying this imagery because it was argued that this historic imagery might actually prove useful to researchers who were maybe studying geography this program had started development in the understanding that the u2 spy planes were gonna have a limited life the truth was even the first youtube spy planes flying over russia had been tracked by radar and it was only a matter of time until they were shot down but spacecraft flew above all these air defenses and to a certain extent they flew above the political problems of flying your cameras over other countries uh you know to a certain extent the soviet union by launching sputnik first implicitly gave everybody else permission to fly their satellites over you know the soviet union the corona satellites launched on board a thor agena that's a thor booster with an agena second stage but the agena's second stage was actually much more complex it actually included sensors for attitude control it provided power communications and the rest of the spacecraft could just be bolted on the front of it it was a fully operating satellite bus to operate as reconnaissance satellites the spacecraft had to be launched into polar orbits that they would fly over russia that meant that they would be launched out of vandenberg air force base actually at the time when they were originally launched this was they were launched from a place called port arguello which was essentially the southern portion of what is now vandenberg it was originally an uh navy facility and then it became part of the air force later the agena used nitric acid and udmh as its propellant the engine was originally developed for the hustler missile but it found more use as an agena upper stage engine once in orbit it would orientate orient itself and this camera would scan a swath of land underneath it the camera would essentially scan across onto a single piece of film and it would have a very very long piece of film thousands of feet long i think the early flight had about three thousand feet of film and as the film moved to the camera it would be loaded into a capsule or a bucket on the front of the spacecraft the operators would be able to send commands to the spacecraft to tell it when to take photographs so they would observe the satellite figure out what orbit it was on and when it would be passing over areas of interest and then command it to take photos during those particular times once it had used up all its film the spacecraft would orient itself to a return trajectory and then it would pop off that spacecraft on the front of the return bucket which would shoot away using a little solid rocket motor to slow its orbital velocity apparently the real ones were spin stabilized and they had attitude gas you know thrusters they would have a heat shield to protect them during re-entry and once they were low enough in the atmosphere a pressure sensor would trip and a parachute would deploy and the bucket would get pulled out and the bucket would then descend under a parachute towards the ground but that wouldn't be the end of this experience because they wanted to make sure these parrot these capsules were not recovered by anyone who shouldn't be finding this super classified film so the plan was that these would be descending over the ocean in the middle of nowhere where nobody could see what was going on and before they touched the water they would be captured by an aircraft in flight which was a pretty amazing concept this didn't always happen in fact the first successful recovery of any object from orbit was corona program flight number 13 where the capsule ended up going off course it ended up over 100 miles away from the recovery aircraft but the us navy did have a ship in the area and they were able to recover this highly important package now at this time this was still called the discoverer program officially this was a cover story that was put together to hide the fact what they were really doing they told the press that they were sending biological samples into the into space and recovering them and of course around exactly the same time russia was doing almost the same thing on august 19th i believe belka and strelka two dogs went up into space on board the an early prototype of the vostok capsule and they did return and also curiously the vostok capsule would also be adapted into a spy satellite by the soviet union and it's kind of amazing there wasn't much more than a week later that corona program flight 14 was launched and again they were trying to recover the capsule from the air the aircraft tried to snag it a couple of times until they eventually got it and this was the first recovery of photographic film from space so this contained about 3 000 feet of film showing areas of the soviet union which had never been photographed by the us so you can see that the corona program was a huge step forward for the u.s intelligence services they were finally able to see areas inside the ussr which were completely inaccessible they found air bases that had never been seen previously and they were able to count things like missiles the corona satellites developed there were at least you know four or five iterations of the corona satellite design which added bigger and better cameras improving the resolution over time the initial corona satellites that recorded images had a resolution of about 40 feet that's about 12 meters but by the time the program had finished in 1972 they'd reduce the resolution or improve the resolution to about three feet or one meter this is the kind of thing you would see from early images but you know as time went on they got to they could pick out a lot more detail and can identify more stuff on the ground there were versions of the corona satellite that was were able to generate resolutions of about 1 foot or 30 centimeters but to do that they had to narrow the observation track too much to be useful corona was much better at looking at large wide areas and the us actually developed other satellites in parallel that were able to look much more closely at specific areas so all the u.s spy satellites are known as kh keyhole satellites and the first three corona variants were corona kh 1 2 and 3. the main difference here is that the agena stage was swapped out with a larger one and there were minor improvements in the stability of the design the kh4 delivered the first major upgrade it had two cameras and one was angled slightly ahead of the track and one was aligned slightly behind the reason for this is they would photograph each set each area twice at a slightly different time and that gave them stereoscopic vision so they could see objects coming up and they could estimate the height of things this was obviously great help for the analysts the kh-4a added an improved j-1 camera which brought the resolution from 7.5 meters to 2.75 meters and it also added a second return bucket so they could do two batches of imagery this was the most launched version of corona but it wasn't the last the final version would be 4b which added an even improved j3 camera that brought the resolution down to 1.8 meters or about six feet there were two other programs related to corona one was called argon and it was going to do world mapping at 140 meters resolution there were 12 of those flights and those were the first satellites to take satellite imagery off antarctica and then there was lanyard which was supposed to take much higher resolution imagery using the same scanning type camera used in corona however the performance of this wasn't particularly good and it only flew three times before being superseded by another program known as gambit and while this also launched from vandenberg it launched on board an atlas agena and it was developed and run by the national reconnaissance office also at the same time there was another program called samos which was developed by the us air force apparently they were in much more of a hurry so that satellite would actually develop the film on orbit and then it would scan it and send it back down to earth electronically it would also ship the stuff via the return bucket technique apparently the quality of the imagery wasn't really worth the extra effort and so the project never went very far however the same camera design and the developing and the scanning would be taken to the moon for the lunar orbiter project where of course it was much harder to get a physical uh roll of film back from the moon but i guess the air force continued in the spy game for a little while because they proposed the manned orbiting laboratory kh-10 that would be a gemini spacecraft and the crew after getting into orbit would open up a hatch in the heat shield and climb into a lab where they would be able to control cameras and point them at target of opportunity and therefore respond in real time and hopefully get better intelligence that never flew but it was certainly a fascinating project the gambit would evolve into the hexagon which would have a monster of four return buckets and this would fly from 1971 right up till 1986 uh it was declassified in 2011 but i believe that's the last of the large photographic uh spy satellites after that they all went to electro-optical and that was the kh-11 cannon and its successors which are still heavily classified although we do know they share a lot in common with the hubble space telescope and two more were donated to nasa one of which is being used to make the wfirst telescope but yes that's 60 years since spy satellites as we know it began and this is the design of the bucket that the cia used to bring corona back from space and hopefully i won't get demonetised for saying this i'm scott manley fly safe [Music] you

Channel: Scott Manley

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Id: rLmpXgdgNZM

Length: 10min 57sec (657 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020